In his weekly monologue Neil Oliver gives his perspective on the changing of the guard at #10 Downing Street. Meet the potential new boss, same as the old boss etc. While drawing attention to the detached and aloof viewpoints of the self-installed ‘ruling class’, Oliver riffs one of the best lines from this week:
…“Two years ago, I gave scant thought to acronyms like WHO, UN, WEF. Now I watch them with the same attention I give to dogs that look like they might bite.”…
Damned if that isn’t the truth. WATCH:
[Transcript] – The running of this country has precious little to do with we, the people – that much becomes more obvious every day. Ever more blatantly the powers that be are treating us like the sitting tenants in a property they want to knock down so they can sell the plot for profit to their pals and assorted foreign carpet baggers.
We the people, with our individual opinions and ambitions and dreams are just in the way of their anti-human fantasy of a so-called progressive future. They got fed up waiting for us to die of old age in our armchairs, in front of three bar electric fires we can’t afford to switch on, and have set about demolishing the old place while we’re still living in it.
Love him or loathe him – and I’ve been no fan of him or of any of the leaders we find ourselves saddled with in the West – PM Boris Johnson was brought down last week not by the millions who had voted for him, as might have been appropriate given any meaningful understanding of the concept of democracy – but by a hellish coupling of media and the self-worshipping political class that appointed themselves judge, jury and executioner. Together they wanted Johnson gone, and so he was gone.
The party atmosphere after his resignation – the glee and the gloating by those journalists that had conspired and shared in the taking of his scalp was plain to see. I really don’t think it’s supposed to be that way.
In the aftermath of Johnson’s defenestration there was a suggestion from former Tory PM John Major that the process of anointing the next leader of the Conservatives should bypass party members altogether – presumably in case troublesome proles with their taste for Brexit and borders, even for Britain itself, picked the wrong person again. Far better, thought the likes of Major, if Tory MPs just exercised their superior intellects and morals and did the choosing for them.
Hoary old Tory and arch-remainer Michael Heseltine’s cage was evidently rattled by all the noise and in predictable style he was instantly crowing that the passing of Johnson should mean the end of Brexit.
Once more the proof that those regarding themselves as our intellectual superiors still regard a decision made by an undeniable majority of British people only as evidence of the stupidity of the great unwashed.
In displays of audacity and temerity that are beyond the reach of adjectives, those that plotted Johnson’s demise are falling over one another to take his place. It’s like looking through a microscope at something revolting happening in a petri dish. Former chancellor Rishi Sunak had his slick and glossy show reel ready for broadcast before his former boss had delivered his resignation speech. I wonder when he performed for that instead of doing more damage to the economy. I don’t feel like having any of their names in my mouth, I really don’t.
So I will just say that for me the thought of any that stood for lockdowns, for damaging children’s physical and mental wellbeing, that oversaw the crashing of the economy, watched uncounted lives physically and mentally destroyed, advocated mask wearing on the street and cheer led the unholy pressure to take experimental injections or lose jobs and or reputations as a consequence … that called for digital vaccine passports or anything like them … that won’t shout from the highest hill that the green agenda and Net Zero are a disaster and must be scrapped immediately … the thought of any that demanded it all, or stayed silent while it all played out, should now occupy No. 10 and contemplate more of the same in the months ahead makes me sick to my stomach.
For me the change of PM is nothing more than a change of drivers on a train. The train we’re on is going where it’s scheduled and timetabled to go, on rails already laid, and in the face of its forward momentum we the people, it would seem, count for nothing.
From behind one podium after another, western leaders and their lackeys talk more and more openly about a liberal world order – even a rules-based liberal world order. The more I hear and see about a world ordered by self-described liberals and their rules, the less I like it. I certainly don’t recall ever being invited to vote for it. Two years ago I gave scant thought to acronyms like WHO, UN, WEF. Now I watch them with the same attention I give to dogs that look like they might bite.
At some point in the past – and I missed that point too, whenever it was, I will freely admit – the governing class decided they were done with serving us and that they own us and rule us instead. That cancerous thought has metastasized in recent years, so that it’s not just governments and their bureaucrats and preferred scientists who presume to lord it over us, to tell us what to do, what to think.
That same deranged thought is there throughout the greediest capitalist corporations now as well. The technocrats took free speech by the throat long ago, so as to preserve and push their own self-described progressive ideologies. Now that same superiority complex is everywhere else as well.
Halifax bank got on their high horse about pronouns and loftily declared that customers who didn’t like seeing staff wearing such on their badges should take their business elsewhere. And so, customers duly did, right enough, taking their hard-earned cash with them.
Since when did money-grubbing corporations decide it was appropriate to start telling customers what to think about sex and gender?
Ice Cream vendors Ben and Jerrys got on their soap box to criticize the British government’s plan to offshore asylum seekers to Rwanda – when surely their time would be better spent learning more about obesity and diabetes and their likeliest causes.
So here we are – we the British people are held in low regard not just by politicians and their ilk, not just by the awkward savants of the search engines and social media platforms, but even by High Street banks and ice cream vendors.
It feels like there is a club somewhere, or a positive feedback loop, in which everyone involved, and it’s definitely not us – politicians of all stripes, faceless bureaucrats, journalists, bankers and corporations – feels entitled to make all the decisions about every aspect of our lives and then to tell us how it’s going to be. We the people are to be downtrodden, demoralized and deceived.
In the wider world, it is farmers who are the latest citizens pushed beyond breaking point. In a replay of the Truckers’ protest in Canada that so captivated many of us, gave us hope however brief that an end to the deliberately destructive madness might be in sight, there are tractor protests in the Netherlands, in Germany, in Italy, in Poland.
When those who grow and raise the food we eat are angry and scared enough to down tools and take to the streets to fight for their very existence, when those who drive the trucks that bring us everything we depend upon for our daily lives have done likewise … perhaps it’s finally time to pay attention to the unfolding catastrophe.
Among the Dutch farmers the anger was pushed above boiling point by government diktats regarding emissions of nitrogen and ammonia into the environment. Plans to reduce those emissions by as much as 70 percent will, farmers say, put many of them out of business altogether. They say it’s not about saving nature, but about leftist government plans to change land use in the Netherlands, forcing farmers to sell their land and to cut the national cattle herd by as much as 50 per cent.
Dutch farmers are among the most productive in the world – exporting 100 billion dollars worth of dairy and crops every year. Their banners say No farmers, no food.
The world is in a time of food insecurity and still governments would apparently prefer to contemplate a future in which people will suffer in every conceivable way. And in the future presently shaping up, people will most definitely suffer. Those governments are plainly not in the business of fixing anything, rather making matters worse.
Canadian PM Justin Trudeau – he that forcibly shut down the truckers’ protest in his own county and seized their bank accounts – has his country on a similar path to that of the Dutch. In a time of global food insecurity – blamed in part on war in Ukraine – ideologically driven administrations are stamping their metaphorical boots down upon their farmers’ backs.
In Holland, shots have been fired – allegedly by police, at one tractor. This is how basic things are becoming, how near the bone. Here in the west, in the 21st century, we are being prepared not just for a future without cars, but a future of less energy… less warmth… and even less food.
I knew there was something badly wrong with all that’s going on when I realized my response to what was happening, to all that we were being told, was physical. All of this actually makes me feel ill, to my bones.
I have never in my life before listened to government policy – and to the policies of governments all around the world – and felt endangered. But I do now. If you feel that too – a deep physiological response to the last two years, and a growing sense of something malevolent – then you are not alone. Sometimes it feels like society itself has been poisoned – and that all that society is being offered is yet more poisonous nonsense.
We should notice that it is from among us, the ordinary people, that the farmers and the truckers come – so that it is we who really have the power that matters in the end.
In Sri Lanka, they’re quite a bit further down the line than us – although hardly out of sight. Thousands of people, driven beyond endurance by economic collapse and the worst food and fuel shortages in living memory, found they had nothing left to lose. I read this morning about protestors there storming and occupying their president’s official residence in the city of Colombo.
Desperate people and desperate measures. It’s interesting to note that, contrary to what Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum might think … it turns out that when some people find they actually do own nothing anymore – they’re really not very happy at all. (LINK)